Multiplayer

Original multiplayer

Kevin Armstrong, Oni's networking programmer, is seated at the computer in the background (MacWorld NY '99)

Perhaps the biggest blow to Oni's reception was that there was no multiplayer option. Combined with complaints about the AI, players wanted to be able to play against other humans, but this option, although developed internally at Bungie West, was not included in the release due to the constraints of Internet gameplay latency at the time. The public viewed this as another sign of the game's incompletion, comparing Oni to FPS titles with multiplayer such as Unreal and Quake, and failing to recognize that melee combat over the Internet was nearly impossible at that time (and still is; Overgrowth a.k.a. Lugaru 2 promises LAN support only; a notable exception seems to be State of Emergency, a melee-oriented game that apparently had reasonably fluid online multiplayer).

It is not clear why Bungie did not at least include LAN play functionality, since it was being used in their office for netgames and can be seen in use about 30 minutes into this Bungie video broadcast from the San Francisco Macworld Expo on January 6, 2000 (you can see the 2-minute sequence on its own HERE; these 2 minutes are the only in-game Oni footage in all of the Bungie TV broadcasts). Visitors to Bungie's booth at the New York City MacWorld Expo of July 1999 and the San Francisco Macworld Expo of January 2000 were even able to play Oni LAN games (pictured at right). However, it is possible that multiplayer suffered from more than latency, and that, without more time to develop this mode of gameplay, the developers decided to cut it rather than frustrate players with an incomplete netplay feature.

Some words from the Oni staff on multiplayer (back when it was in development) can be found in the interviews with Kevin Armstrong (networking programmer) and Steve Abeyta (3D animator, mentions "Oni Soccer" and kickable furniture).

Fake multiplayer

In Oni Team Arena, you fight on one side of a large AI-driven battle.

Oni Team Arena. Developed by geyser, after an "Unreal Tournament" attempt by Script10000, with help from Your_Mom and EdT. Emulates multiplayer-like gameplay with respawning bots, meant to experiment with advanced modding, multiplayer-oriented or not (e.g., AI or collision upgrades). Project page HERE. Currently more or less maintained by Gumby, but don't hold your breath (ADD, scope creep, whatever). In fall 2008, the Mac engine was brought on par with the PC engine, with BSL functions such as chr_focus and chr_location, which opened the way for a platform-independent and fully featured version of OTA.

Apart from gameplay videos such as THIS one, a remarkable scene (heartwarming and disturbing at the same time... --geyser) is that of Russian kids playing Oni Team Arena and enjoying themselves tremendously.

Fan-made multiplayer

A character controlled by the copy of Oni running on the right executes a move which is seen in the copy of Oni on the left.

Multiplayer was cut at pre-beta and so wasn't available even to the beta testers. No source code has leaked into the community to this day, pre-beta or otherwise. Even so, there have been efforts to reverse-engineer Oni's runtime to a point of synchronizing relevant structures of the game's state between computers.

OniPlayer was a project coordinated by typhen and involving Alloc, Kumo, and ssg. Up to the departure of typhen, the project remained in the address-finding phase, with applications limited to Alloc's OniTrainer and typhen's OniFly (the Trainer allowed the user to set or freeze most of the known variables on demand, whereas OniFly performed elaborate freezing on character positions based on their aiming vector). Later, neonew put the knowledge to use with OniHook, actually tracking and patching a character's animations as if synchronizing action over a network.

Current knowledge of Oni's game-state and character-state structures is very nearly sufficient for multiplayer. Implementations can combine memory watching and patching, and can also be driven to some extent by Oni's own events, hooked for the purpose. Current developments include the Flatline experiment (an external patcher) and the Daodan DLL.

Some multiplayer-related features are actually present in Oni, such as "combat stats" (frag and damage counters) for every character. These combat stats are not yet accessible from BSL and so are not put to use in OTA; another problem is that dying AI lose their MELE profile, so that bots can't keep fighting after they've been fragged. An experimental fix for the latter exists, but it hasn't been implemented in a public release of the Daodan DLL as of yet.